All posts tagged ‘Arne Duncan’

This week, November 7th through the 10th, Microsoft hosted educators all over the world in Washington, D.C. for the annual Partners in Learning Global Forum event. Educators got the opportunity to network, attend keynote speeches from educational leaders and present their own innovative projects that leverage technology in the classroom. The event is a great complement to the Microsoft Imagine Cup, with an emphasis on inspiring and addressing world-wide education concerns.

On Tuesday’s keynote, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, along with Microsoft Vice President of Education Anthony Salcito, announced that the DOE’s TEACH campaign will be taken over by Microsoft. This site, a marketing effort aimed at recruiting new teachers, will be moved from its current home at teach.gov to a new site, teach.org. Going forward, Microsoft will be forming a coalition of private-sector companies to support these efforts. Secretary Duncan’s full remarks can be read at the ed.gov website.

This is an interesting move by the Department of Education. Teach.gov launched a little over a year ago and aimed to help show people what teaching was really like. It also provides resources on how to get started in this career including directing access to financial aid scholarships or federal grant programs that can help.

Out of curiosity, I took the existing survey to become a teacher and while the links to further information were good, there didn’t seem to be a lot of targeted information for me for finding a job in Wisconsin. I did enjoy seeing how easy it was to import new job data, with plenty of helpful XML syntax. For a site that wants to be the clearing house for teaching-related job information, both on the recruitment side as well as the employer side, that openness is welcome. I’m hopeful that Microsoft will recognize that need for that openness and ease of use while simultaneously increasing the depth of information there, which quite frankly, can use some work.

But the event is more than just a place where education leaders can make policy announcements. Educators showcased innovative ways they’ve integrated technology into their classroom curriculum, whether that involved programming, data analysis, or online collaboration. These projects are judged by a panel of education experts and awarded prizes at the end of the event. There were a number of U.S. educators present among the 115 world-wide educators competing in Washington DC. The below video shows some of these educators talking about their projects.

The “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) Act of 2001 is up for reauthorization, amid a great deal of debate about which parts of it have succeeded and which have failed. On Tuesday evening, I attended a “town hall” meeting in Arlington, Virginia, at which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan discussed the Obama administration’s plans for changes to the legislation before its renewal. He also talked about what parents and communities need to do to make U.S. schools better.

The first thing about NCLB that will be changed, Duncan said, is its name, as the current one “has become toxic.” But that’s the least of the changes he wants to see. There needs to be a set of national standards for students, he said, instead of the current system in which each state has its own; and the standards need to be set high enough that students who meet them are genuinely prepared for college. The system needs to deal better with teachers, he said: rewarding the best teachers, supporting good ones with room for improvement, and — there’s really no way to put it nicely — getting rid of those who simply shouldn’t be teaching. Further, raising the pay for special-education and mathematics teachers is a priority for Duncan, as too few highly qualified individuals seek out those jobs today.

Duncan also pointed out that the current school year is obsolete, having been based on an agrarian economy that no longer is a reality for most students in the country: few kids need the summer off to help with the farm. Schools, he said, should be open more months of the year, and later hours, too — he pointed out that most schools have resources like libraries, gymnasiums, and computer labs that could be of use to the community during hours when instruction is not taking place. Some schools have started partnerships with local community centers, boys’ and girls’ clubs, and the like, whereby part of the school is run by the outside entity and stays open after the rest of the school closes. Expanding this kind of idea across the country could help schools trim costs while at the same time provide a benefit to their local communities.

If you’re a parent of a schoolkid in the United States and have concerns about anything related to the public schools in the country, tonight you have a chance to really do something about it. From 8:00pm to 9:00pm Eastern tonight, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will be conducting a national “town hall” meeting.

Titled “America Goes Back to School,” the town hall meeting is intended to focus on the following topics (among others), copied from the Department of Education website:

What is working and what needs to change in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act?

What do we need to do, and what do we need to do differently to ensure our students are successful?

What does a quality school look like and how can more schools become consistently high achieving?

How can parents become more involved with and engaged in their child’s education?

What are some effective practices for recruiting, retaining, supporting and compensating highly effective teachers?

What steps are schools at all levels of education taking to ensure a safe and healthy learning environment?

(The “Elementary and Secondary Education Act” referenced in the first question was first passed in 1965 and has been reauthorized several times since, most recently and famously by the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001.)

If you’d like to watch the town hall, you can watch the webcast or find a list of ways to watch on TV here. If you’d like to participate, you can leave a comment on the Department of Education blog post about it, or, during the show, you will be able to email or call with questions (to an address or phone number that will be displayed at that time).

I will be at the live broadcast of the town hall, so please also check back here on GeekDad for my article later this week covering the event.